In the darkness
by LyingOutLoud - old fic central
Summary: After an unknown jutsu, Naruto becomes a prisoner in his own body and has to rely on his friends to free him. ON HIATUS, sorry.
1. In hell

Summary: After an unknown jutsu, Naruto becomes a prisoner in his own body and has to rely on his friends to free him.

Warnings: Angst. OOC-ness. Possible shounen ai. It's about Naruto and Sasuke, but not even _I_'m sure if it's romance or friendship, and I wrote it. So interpret it any way you like. Let's see, what else? English is not my first language. Oh, and there will be some bad words. Okay, a lot.

Disclaimer: I do not, I repeat, NOT own Naruto. At all. Doesn't life suck?

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**Chapter 1**

I was probably dead.

No matter how many times I thought about it, I always came to the same conclusion: I was dead and in hell. There was no light, no sound, only pain. Oh gods, the pain. It was awful. You would have to feel it yourself to believe it. It felt like my entire body was being ripped to pieces and burned to ash at the same time. I screamed. That is, I tried to scream, but I felt my throat constrict. I couldn't hear anything at all, but I was sure that I hadn't made a sound. Do you know what it's like to hurt like that and not be able to scream? I couldn't even move. I would order my arms to move, or my legs, and they would just _lie_ there, ignoring me, mocking me. So I lay there in the silence, in the darkness, in pain, and I couldn't scream or move. All I could do was lie there and feel the tears flow down my face. So, naturally, the only logical conclusion in my pained mind was that I was dead and in hell and that there was no way to escape.

The mission had seemed easy enough. We were to escort a young woman to the town where she was to marry. Her father had sounded proud as he told us how excited his daughter was about her upcoming marriage, how she had made her village proud and how she was the perfect daughter. All the while she had stood there, smiling at her father. So, the three of us figured, this would be an easy mission, a fun one, even. After all, we were going to escort this girl to the happiest day of her life, right? Shows how much we knew.

The second – I kid you not, the _very _second – the door of her father's house closed behind her, she had broken down in tears. She didn't stop crying for two days. She cried as we walked, as she ate, she even cried in her sleep. It was the most pitiful sound I had ever heard. She couldn't even stop crying long enough to tell us what was wrong until the morning of the third day. She seemed calmer that morning and she had stopped tearing out her hair, so Sasuke and I decided to go fishing and let Sakura do whatever it is that girls do to get each other to talk. Apparently her girltalk-magic had worked, because when Sasuke and I came back two hours later with exactly _zero _fish, Sakura was able to tell us the whole story.

It was, of course, the classic 'girl-loves-boy-but-has-to-marry-another-for-the-sake-of-her-village/family/honour'-tragedy. Her village had once been prosperous, but now it was becoming poorer every year. It was a vicious cycle: there had been several years where the harvest had been disappointing, so that the village hadn't had enough money to buy new supplies and seeds, causing harvests to be bad, and so on. To break the cycle, they had decided to form a contract with another village. As a sign of trust, the villageleaders had agreed to bind their villages to each other through marriage, as well. And so our charge, as the mayor's daughter, was asked to give herself away in marriage to a man she didn't love, didn't even know. She, being a loving daughter, not only of her father, but of the whole village, had agreed, even if it meant she had to end her current relationship. And here she was, giving up her own happiness for that of her village. She must have seen how our hearts were breaking for her, because she straightened her back, and told us in a wobbly voice that we should get going if we wanted to reach our destination before sunset. And then she started to cry again. I think even Sasuke got a little emotional over that, though it could've been gas.

She forgot to tell us one thing, though. One tiny, fucking important little thing. This boy she had been seeing, he wasn't the type to give up easily. Oh, and he had friends. _Ninja _friends. By the time we knew what hit us, she had been kidnapped already. For a moment, I contemplated letting them go. I'm sure the others did, too. She'd be so much happier. But then I realised that she probably wouldn't be happy knowing that her actions hurt her village. And we had to complete our mission. We _had_ to. Not only for her sake, or that of her village, but also for the sake of Konoha. It would look bad if we let this girl go, and Konoha might get less missions and therefore less money. So, even if I felt bad about it, I chased after the group, Sasuke and Sakura not far behind. It wasn't long before we caught up with them. And that's when things had started to go horribly, _horribly _wrong.

They weren't planning on letting her go. Even as we fought them, and she screamed at them to stop it, that this was her choice, that she wouldn't go back with them, they told us that we were bad people for forcing a woman into a marriage she didn't want. Never mind that it hadn't been our idea, and that she had come with us willingly. But it wasn't their accusations that sent me over the edge, it was the way they worded them. They said we were monsters for doing those things. _Monsters_. Yeah. That didn't go over very well with me. I knocked four of them out by myself, and was about to do the same to the fifth while Sasuke and Sakura were checking if our charge was alright. But just as I was going to send the man to sleep, his hands rapidly formed seals I didn't recognise. I had about two seconds to look at him suspiciously before my entire world turned into one big heap of pain and I found myself where I was now.

In hell.


	2. Of bouncing and pie

Author's note/warnings: Okay, let's give this thing a reboot. I uploaded the first chapter a long time ago, and then writing academic assignments killed any joy I had in writing. And now I'm slowly starting to get it back. So let's do this. Warnings in chapter one still stand, with an added note on the timeline: there is none. Let's say it's an alternate universe where Sasuke never left and the members of team 7 are now about 16. This is just a short chapter to work up to the main part of the story, and for me to get a feeling for it. Thank you for reading!

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**Chapter 2; Of bouncing and pie.  
**

Hell was bouncing.

Hell was dark, silent, paralysing and painful but it was also bouncing and it smelled familiar. Somehow I didn't think hell should smell like sweat, grass and metal. I hadn't made up my mind about the appropriateness of it bouncing yet. If I wasn't in hell, then I probably wasn't dead. If I wasn't dead, then I might soon actually _be_ dead, because obviously something was very, very wrong with me. If something was wrong with me, then I could only hope my team-mates had gotten out okay. I couldn't exactly look to check. And if I wasn't dead (_yet_), then the bouncing and the smell of sweat probably meant I was being carried by someone. So who was it? Did we get away and was I being carried to safety? Or had I been captured?

Deciding that worrying over my fate and the fate of my friends wouldn't help me to get out of this situation, I focused on the question of what had happened to me. If I could figure out what had happened, I might undo it, find out who was jostling me around so _very_ uncarefully and escape if needed. Besides, the thinking helped to distract me from the pain. Thankfully, the pain was very slowly becoming less and less blinding. Though I wasn't becoming any less blind. Heh.

I figured that weird jutsu I had seen must've done something to my senses to incapacitate me. No senses and excruciating pain make an easy target. But was it actually physical? Maybe it was an illusion. But how could I dispel it if I couldn't move, couldn't speak? Were my eyes, ears and muscles affected, or my brain? Would it go away by itself? What if I was going to stay like this forever? I'd never make Hokage if I couldn't see, hear, speak or move! They might as well stick me in a corner like a potted plant. Maybe hang lights on me during the festive season.

Obviously thinking about my incapacity wasn't helping me either, so I went back to figuring out who was _treating my fucking body like a bag of potatoes_. If I could just remember whose smell that was. Iruka-sensei had once told us about a book by some European guy, Spanish I think. Or maybe Italian? Anyway, the guy had written about how the smell of pie (cake? cookies? fuck if I knew) would call back memories of his childhood. There may have been pirates involved, or I made that up myself because seriously, who writes a book about fucking pie? So all I had to do was think of this person, who was now throwing my body on the ground and fuck if that wasn't going to bruise, as a piece of pie. If I could move my jaw I could take a big honking bite out of them. Son of a bitch. Who treats an invalid that way? I was _injured_ here and that bastard couldn't even treat me with a tiny bit of respect! He always did this! I could just hear him now: "ooooh, I'm so much better and stronger than you Naruto, I can just throw you around like you're nothing when you're injured and you can't fight back. Look at me, look at me, I'm Konoha's misunderstood fucking prodigy!"

Well.

It seemed my pie was Sasuke-flavoured.

Which was a good thing. Because it meant that I was safe. It also meant that Sasuke was safe. Which was also a good thing, and as soon as I could move, I'd fucking _murder_ him.


End file.
